The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  She closed her eyes. Opened them. Her breath was coming so fast, she saw it all through a cloud of mist. She could not look away; she could not fill her lungs. Carrie’s arm remained tight around her but Madeleine’s entire body was shaking, and she realized she couldn’t stop that, either.

  Another series of whipping cracks, like gunshots. The forward funnel ripped loose from its cables in a blossom of hellish sparks and soot. The funnel teetered along its edge, then collapsed in a tremendous rush along the starboard side.

  A woman near the back let out a wail. Madeleine felt her throat tighten, every ounce of her wanting to join in with that pained cry, but she couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t yell. She could only watch.

  The steamer’s lights winked out. The stern of the ship rose so high it seemed like some great, invisible hand beneath the ocean must be pulling the prow straight down. More people fell—as her eyes adjusted to the sudden night, she could see them tumbling, blue and silver, lost to the waves below. A series of explosions began, rumbling booms that sounded like rockslides, like the strafing of bombs against a solid hillside or castle.

  Titanic split apart. Just like that, she broke in two, and everything before the aft funnel dropped down in a rush beneath the water. Gone.

  Madeleine bent her head, panting, covering her face with both hands. The cry trapped in her throat escaped but only barely, another airy thin moan whistling past Jack’s leather gloves.

  “Holy God,” whispered Eleanor Widener. “Holy, holy God.”

  When Madeleine could look up again, the aft section of the ship remained practically upright, as if it had been designed to float exactly like that. A shooting star lit a long, fiery path behind it, and as the star sank, so then did the ship: almost gently, almost quietly, except for the splashing and screams.

  * * *

  “There will be suction,” announced the quartermaster. “I need you to pull, lads. This is the time to put your backs into it.”

  The boat spun for a moment while the two sailors found their rhythm; then it began to skim along the water, away from the boiling center of the wreckage. With the profile of Titanic gone, Madeleine thought she saw the bobbing lights of the other lifeboats around them, hundreds of them, thousands, until logic caught up with her perspective and she realized she was seeing the stars reflecting off the ocean, a boundless looking glass that cast their lights up and down and everywhere else in between.

  She felt dizzy, her mouth dry. She shut her eyes and tried to measure out her breaths. When she opened them again, she was gazing downward, forward, at the blades of the oars that dipped and lifted and dipped again, stirring up phosphorus in the water, a golden green glow that spread outward in ripples, softly outlining the boat’s path before sinking back into oblivion.

  “Do we have a lamp?” asked the quartermaster.

  “No, sir,” replied one of the sailors. “I searched and found none.”

  “Very well.”

  The phosphorus dripped, shattered, dripped. Across the ocean, a terrible new noise began to rise.

  She would think, later, that it was the sound of a mortally wounded beast, only if the beast had a thousand-some voices, all of them howling with pain and panic and pleading. The frothing of the water where the stern had gone down had not calmed with its loss. It was full of people, flailing and begging for help.

  The blond woman next to Madeleine was quaking, the child on her lap clutched against her chest. Madeleine noticed that she was wrapped only in thin shawls, cotton or something else like it; beneath the starlight, the colors were faded, but she imagined that when touched with wind and sun, they resembled butterfly wings.

  She pulled the fox shawl from her shoulders, draped it over the woman. She couldn’t fasten the hooks, not while the woman held the child, but she tugged the ends closed as best as she could.

  “Tack så mycket,” the mother whispered. The little girl squirmed, blinking. She lifted a hand to stroke the fur by her face, her eyes amazed.

  The oarsmen had ceased their rowing, blades up, huffing. The lifeboat resumed its slow, aimless spin.

  “We have to go back,” Madeleine said. It was difficult to get the words out without her teeth chattering. She looked up at the quartermaster, who now stood by the tiller with, oddly, an unlit pipe in one hand. “We have to. Only listen to them.”

  “Yes,” agreed Eleanor. “Yes, she’s right.”

  “The suction,” said one of the oarsmen instantly. “We can’t.”

  “Surely it’s done by now,” said a woman seated on the other side of Eleanor.

  “This boat is half empty,” added someone else, a matron wrapped in sable like Madeleine. Her voice shook, but Madeleine thought it might be from anger, not cold. “We abandoned ship with seats to spare. We left behind our husbands and sons because you told us we had to, and now they’re out there dying.”

  The quartermaster stroked his moustache. “I don’t think it’s—”

  “They’re dying,” Madeleine shouted, enraged. She stood up, holding her coat closed over her chest, her fingers bent into claws. “And we have the room! Listen to them! Listen! We have to go back!”

  The quartermaster turned, looked back at the distant chaos, the frantic splashing.

  “Sir!” protested the same oarsman. “Sir, think on it! It’s madness! They’ll swamp us for certain!”

  A murmur of assent rose from a pair of women near the front, but the quartermaster spoke over them.

  “Not if we’re vigilant. We’ll circle along the edges to start.” He jammed the pipe into his front pocket. “Right, then. We’re coming about.”

  The oarsman dropped his oar. “I’m not doing it.”

  “Are you refusing a direct order, seaman?”

  “Not refusing, sir. I injured my shoulder just now.” The man crossed his arms, sullen.

  “Well, ain’t you just a bloody princess?” sneered one of the men they’d rescued from the aft ropes, the one who hadn’t fallen into the water. “Shove off, then, mate. I’ll row.”

  * * *

  But in the end, it took all of them rowing, Madeleine and Eleanor and any of the other women who could, to stroke back to the flotsam of human souls and debris, to begin the dreadful task of trying to salvage the dying from the glossy black sea.

  CHAPTER 26

  We pulled eight men from the water that night. Two of them were drunk. Two of them died, one right at my feet. All of them seemed delirious, almost—I can’t think of a better word for it. Crazed, perhaps. Even after we’d gotten them aboard, covered them with rugs, they moaned and raved. I believe some of them didn’t even realize they were no longer in the water.

  All of them were wearing lifebelts, which seemed a godsend at the time.

  It was, I guess. For them.

  But for all those other souls, those fifteen-hundred or so still thrashing for their lives . . . they, too, were wearing the cork-and-canvas vests that would not save them, nor let them drown. And so that is how they died. Frozen in place.

  I looked and looked for him. I looked in the darkness of night; I looked in the dawn. I searched every face I found, first the living, subsequently the dead. Like the ocean and stars, sometimes I still see them floating, one after another, behind my closed lids.

  I told myself that he had made it into another boat, that he had to be on another boat.

  I never stopped looking.

  Monday, April 15th

  Adrift

  Lifeboat Four was leaking. No one could pinpoint the source of it, but it was. Ice-cold water sloshed along its bottom, leisurely rising no matter how much any of them bailed.

  The silence of the night expanded, infinite but for their own hushed voices and the gentle lapping of water against wood. After she and four other women had tugged and pulled the last man aboard, Madeleine realized she no longer heard the ghastly dying-beast sound; in the last twenty minutes or so, she’d noticed it thinning, flattening into a dull monotone. But she’d not noticed u
ntil just this moment that it was utterly done.

  No one else cried out for help. Nor would they, ever again.

  The terrible peace of it rang in her head. They searched a while longer anyway, rowing this way and that, but there was no one alive to save.

  A baby whimpered, and the man at Madeleine’s feet groaned. He was too weak to sit up on his own, and there wasn’t enough space to lie him along the benches, so they’d propped him up against the side as best they could. He seemed insensible, his legs sprawled, pressing against her. The violent shivers that wracked him shook her as well, no matter how she tried to shift away. Every now and then, she’d bend down to chafe her palms against his face and neck. She wasn’t sure why beyond a vague notion to let him know that even in his delirium, he wasn’t alone.

  “He knew,” said a woman to Madeleine’s left, low and vehement.

  “What?” said another. Eleanor.

  “Mr. Ismay. He knew about the ice. Marian and I ran into him yesterday on the promenade. We’d gone out to look at the sunset, and he walked up. He’d gotten a Marconigram about it from another ship. He showed it to us. He told us we were among the icebergs.”

  Madeleine gazed out into the darkness, her jaw clenched, listening. All of them were listening now.

  “He told us they were going to start up more of the boilers to go faster. That we were going to get to New York early.” The woman’s voice broke.

  “Emily—”

  “He knew,” she said again, louder.

  The man at Madeleine’s feet had stopped shivering. She folded her hands over her stomach and closed her eyes, tired of looking at the stars.

  * * *

  They tied up to a group of other lifeboats, she wasn’t certain how many. Four or five, enough to form a miniature flotilla that revolved in a wide, lazy circle, governed by the cold northern currents; no one bothered now to row. After a burst of greetings, of people calling out names, hopeful, over and over again hopeful, until the lack of answer became their answer, the silence won again.

  Far away along the unwrinkled line of the ocean, someone in another lifeboat occasionally launched flares that lifted, exploded, thin green darts of fire that melted into nothing long before they reached the water. Even the shooting stars seemed more bold.

  The eastern edge of the sky began to separate itself from the Atlantic, going from black to indigo to wine. As the light lifted, she was able to better see all the people around her, their eyes bloodshot, their faces chapped. A breeze rose, sending the calm water into ripples that broke against meandering small chunks of ice.

  The sound of a whistle sliced through the chill. An infant released a startled cry. Madeleine lifted her head, then joined several others standing to discover the source. Just barely in view, a group of about thirty men balanced in two neat rows atop what looked like a floating shelf of ice. The man holding the whistle shrilled it again; some of the other men began waving their arms.

  Hope caught at her once more, a hot blazing thing. She turned to the quartermaster, who was already reaching to uncouple their boat.

  “We’ve room for eight or ten,” he called to the crewmen in the other boats. “Who else will go?”

  A second boat cut loose from their flotilla, and the pair of them began to creep along. Madeleine sat against the port gunwale, leaning out to better see. Before she could make out their faces, she could make out their perch: not ice at all, but an overturned lifeboat, rapidly sinking.

  None of the men were Jack. She knew it even before the morning was clear enough to tell. None of them had his lean frame, his posture.

  The man with the whistle was the same officer who’d shoved her aboard from the promenade window a lifetime ago. Who’d told her husband that he could not go with her.

  “Come and take us off!” the man shouted, hoarse.

  Behind him—oh, behind him, bright as sundrops against the purple-pink sky—shone the mast lights of a steamship heading their way.

  * * *

  They did not have room for eight or ten more people. They scarcely had room for five, and then only if everyone stood up. The water was up to Madeleine’s ankles; she’d lost feeling in her feet a half hour past. With every new man added to their group, the lifeboat rocked and dipped lower into the waves.

  “We’ll have to row to her,” decided the quartermaster, eyeing the approaching ship. “She’s miles out still. We won’t be afloat by the time she makes it here.”

  People rearranged themselves, stood sideways, making room for the pulling oars.

  With a sudden brilliance, the sun breached the boundary of the sea, spilling a warm lemon light up and up, bleeding through the pink. It spread across the heavens, all the water, and caught in bright burning lines along the icebergs that had been floating around them all along, unseen in the dark.

  They were glass mountains, jagged and pale. They were frozen fairy-tale monsters gleaming like opals, coral and salmon and mauve, scattered near and far.

  “Holy God,” whispered Eleanor Widener again, crammed against Madeleine’s side. Madeleine twisted her wrist, finding the other woman’s hand; they held tight.

  As the lifeboat inched toward the steamer, the light fell too upon all that was left of Titanic: deck chairs and shattered doors; bodies that spun by looking like nothing more than blanched and broken dolls, standing whimsically upright in the ocean with their arms out, fingers curved.

  The weight of the dead man pressed against her feet. Inside her, she felt Jack’s baby shift.

  * * *

  The steamship was called Carpathia; she read its name through a squint against the light. She had a single funnel instead of four, and steep gray-dark sides, and as their lifeboat limped up to her, the ice water inside it was up to Madeleine’s shins.

  Her thoughts had become feathery and fleeting. She was thirsty and she was not; she was warm and she was not. Every now and then a swarm of spots would begin to burst along the edges of her vision. Whenever that happened, all she could do was hang her head, hoping for the best.

  “We must get her aboard,” said someone in her ear, urgent. She thought they were likely talking about the crying infant and tried to agree, but her lips wouldn’t move. Her tongue was too clickity-dry, anyway.

  The boat tossed, and she felt herself falling. Only she couldn’t fall. No one could. They were packed in too tightly; the falling was all in her head.

  “Here, miss,” said a man with an English accent, and to her surprise, Madeleine found herself seated upon a swinging plank that seemed to be rising . . . rising . . .

  She was holding onto the ropes beside her with both hands, buckled straps bound across her legs.

  There was a ship at her back. There was an ocean ahead.

  She was rising without her own will, without having to do anything at all to make it happen, the plank and ropes jerking. She rose and looked out over the curve of the earth laid out like a vivid blue cartographer’s map, dotted with white, with slow-spinning swirls of ice green and black.

  * * *

  In a shadowed chamber, Madeleine came back to herself, opening her eyes to a single electric lightbulb burning naked against the wall—

  —that stormy night on the Noma, her father telling her to wake—

  —but she was looking at that lightbulb and . . . linen. At the high climb of a fat pillow and wrinkled sheets.

  It was not her pillow, scented with a fragrance she didn’t know. It was not her bed, with its downy wide comfort. This mattress felt too firm. A hard lump nudged up against her ribcage.

  A glass of water sat before her on a nightstand. She reached for it, drained it, set it down again.

  The bed and floor and all of it beneath her moved, a sluggish lift and fall. She’d spent so many hours at sea, she understood at once what it meant.

  I am on a boat. A ship. I’m on—

  She remembered. She remembered being guided aboard, the bosun’s chair swinging against the topsides of this new steamer until t
he crew had caught it up, pulling her safely back to the deck. She remembered them freeing her from the straps, helping her to a saloon, where a man who told her three times that he was a physician—she kept asking—gave her a quick examination before telling someone else that she needed hydration and heat and a decent place to rest. Somewhere quiet, and at once.

  She’d wanted to protest that. The lack of the wounded-beast noise still haunted her, and she hadn’t wanted to dwell in it again.

  But a uniformed man with a great deal of gold braid on his sleeves had come to her, along with Eleanor Widener and Carrie and some other women, and they had all led her to this room with its firm bed and plump pillows. Carrie had stripped away her coat and her lifebelt, her dress and corset and shoes, and Madeleine, stupefied, had let her. Had flopped down atop the mattress and surrendered to sleep for who knew how long.

  She inched out of the bed now, her feet testing the rug. The seam of the stocking along the end of her right foot had ripped (hadn’t she been wearing two sets of stockings? where had the other gone?); her big toe poked out. She stood, stretching the sore muscles all along her legs and arms and back.

  The wall to her left had a series of curtained portholes, the cloth panels closed, sunlight outlining a pattern of navy chevrons against stripes. She eyed the curtains warily, wanting to part them and look outside. Afraid of what she might see if she did.

  The door to the room clicked open. A caramel-haired woman who looked familiar—wasn’t she?—came in carrying a tray, balancing it on her hip as she turned to shut the door again. She was wearing a sequined velvet evening dress, despite the fact that it was clearly bright day beyond the portholes.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said pleasantly. “Good. I’ve brought you something to eat. A simple soup for now, nothing too rich.”

  Madeleine pressed a hand to her forehead. “Yes. I—my husband. I need to go—”

  The woman, older and unsmiling, placed the tray on a low table in front of a settee. Her voice was gentle, cautious; she went to Madeleine and lifted her hand. Reflexively, Madeleine accepted it. She noticed that the woman’s gown was water-stained all along the hem, sequins missing, the velvet stiff and ruined.